Was Stonehenge Built with Balls in Rails?



Andrew Young, a doctoral student at the University of Exeter, has a novel proposal about how ancient Britons built Stonehenge. He hypothesizes that they placed balls in grooved tree trunks to act as bearings for the heavy stones:

Young first came up with the ball bearings idea when he noticed that carved stone balls were often found near Neolithic stone circles in Aberdeenshire, Scotland (map).

"I measured and weighed a number of these stone balls and realized that they are all precisely the same size—around 70 millimeters [3 inches] in diameter—which made me think they must have been made to be used in unison, rather than alone," he told National Geographic News.

The balls, Young admitted, have been found near stone circles only in Aberdeenshire and the Orkney Islands (map)—not on Stonehenge's Salisbury Plain.

But, he speculated, at southern sites, including Stonehenge (map), builders may have preferred wooden balls, which would have rotted away long ago. For one thing, wooden balls are much faster to carve. For another, they're much lighter to transport.


Link | Photo: University of Exeter

Comments (14)

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Newest 5 Comments

These balls are from the first ever baseball game - each stonehenge stone was a base. Most bats have disintegrated 'cause they were made of wood - however if you need proof of this - a disgruntled team did throw a few of their bats into a nearby bog - I'm sure they are still there, if you look you'll find them!
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Glad to see King James wasn't a bad sport about it. Pro or not, someone that has practised obscure trickshots to the point of perfection are hard to beat by even the most skilled of players.
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"Oh, well if dunking were allowed... " guys. Its HORSE. There's no dunking. Besides, when you're that tall, dunking isn't difficult in the least. You're just putting a ball into a hoop once you jump to meet it.
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Who says you can't dunk in horse? I've never heard such a rule.

And I'm guessing Kalb can't dunk. Which means if James dunked it every time, he would have won. Obviously that wouldn't be fair since Kalb has physical limitations preventing him from dunking.

But yeah, Kalb trained himself to be a pro-HORSE player, and he won pretty easily. Were they to play a game of 1-on-1, I think James would probably win.
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Underhand from the free throw line? Over the backboard? Come on who hasn't done some of those shots? When I was in my 20's I could hit about seven out of ten from half court. Had I challanged a pro and did better at that one task would that have made me a better player? Of course not. Lebron is a phenomenal player but this wasn't his day at this particular event.
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